Discontinuous reception (DRX) is mainly intended to reduce power consumption of user equipment (UE), and the DRX is configured by means of radio resource control (RRC). UE on which the DRX is configured to discontinuously listen on a physical downlink control channel (PDCCH) to reduce power consumption. In an RRC_CONNECTED mode, if the DRX is configured, the UE discontinuously listens on the PDCCH according to a specified DRX operation. That is, in one DRX period, the UE regularly wakes up for a specific time period to listen on the PDCCH, and in other time, the UE enters a sleep state. If the DRX is not configured, the UE needs to continuously listen on the PDCCH.
In a long DRX state, the UE has a relatively low listening frequency, and consequently handover may fail. After handover of the UE fails, the UE performs an RRC connection re-establishment procedure, and a prerequisite for successful RRC connection re-establishment is that a cell to which the UE initiates the RRC re-establishment has a piece of valid UE context information. In the prior art, when the UE re-selects a new cell, the UE sends an RRC re-establishment request to a base station to which the new cell belongs. If the base station to which the new cell belongs does not have context information of the UE, the context information is requested by using a context fetch procedure from an original cell that serves the UE, so that the UE can complete RRC establishment in the new cell.
Because cell reselection is a voluntary behavior of the UE, there may be no X2 network interface between the new cell re-selected by the UE and the original cell. Consequently, it is possible that the context fetch procedure cannot be completed, and further the RRC connection re-establishment fails.